


The Challenger

by lalaiths



Category: Black Panther (2018), Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Character Study, M/M, PWP, Power Dynamics, kind of?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-28
Updated: 2018-02-28
Packaged: 2019-03-25 01:30:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13823613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalaiths/pseuds/lalaiths
Summary: M'Baku challenges the white wolf, and Bucky just wants to feel human again.





	The Challenger

**Author's Note:**

> I finally got to see black panther and this is the hill i die on???

The first time Bucky wakes after leaving Steve to go under he’s surrounded by blue lights. The walls are painted with colorful murals of masks and symbols. There are modern lit walls that flash strange writing he doesn’t recognize. Large windows look out over trains that fly by with a soft sound that vibrates just under his ribcage. His mind should be whirling with the urgency to find exits, to create contingency plans for when somebody comes with guns to take him out, for when Hydra comes to capture him, for when Zola comes to -- 

But the Swiss doctor is gone now. 

His head feels light and scrubbed free of the heavy scar tissue from the treatments. He loses time to memories -- Becca on his shoulders as he runs down the street towards the carnival in town. His father’s stern brow furrowing as he comes home with scars across his knees. Steve Rogers in a ditch, kicking the bully with an arm like a bar across his small chest. Sarah Rogers coughing on the back porch with her blonde hair shining in the lamplight, Dottie dancing and pressing warm and flush against him in her little pink dress. There are so many memories and they flow in like a waterfall, trickling one after another like an air raid, like an avalanche.

Then there’s the murders and the pain and his hand crushing Maria Stark’s windpipe. There are children and old men and anybody who gets in his way, anybody he’s pointed towards. There are hundreds of targets, there are three wars, four wars (they don’t always call them wars though) there’s the Red Room training then the Hydra storage then there’s Pierce and there’s always that totalitarian ideal, that horror landscape of pain and genocide. There’s one way and don’t you think of Rogers or they’ll take you back to the cryo chamber and rip your memories (all your memories) and you’ll never be Barnes again, never hear Steve Rogers call you Bucky again.

Except he can breathe again, now.

Except his weapon of an arm is missing from him. There’s a phantom limb that’s waiting to strike out hard and crush bone and metal, but that arm is gone and he’s fine, here. He sits up slowly, and when he does his hair is light against his skull. It’s not heavy or matted or thick with disuse. When he runs his one hand through it it’s lighter than he remembers it ever being in his life. There’s a clean scent to it that he can’t quite place. When he looks down he’s dressed in soft, loose-fitting clothes that don’t tug or pinch. He stares for a long moment at the trains going by, carrying bright blue quarry to and fro. 

He gets up slowly, expecting aches and pains to compensate from but almost staggering because there are none. The weight his spine is used to is gone, the weight on his shoulders from the metal supports holding his bones together to keep the arm functional -- gone. He feels the shift of his body but it doesn’t ache when he does. 

When he notices the girl in the corner desk he drops into a defensive position so fast he expects whiplash. It takes him a moment to remember: T’Challa, Wakanda, trigger words, deep sleep. He’s here to heal, not to fight. He’s here to get better, not to die. He’s not their warrior, he’s not here for war. He’s been brought here, he’s come here willingly. 

When the girl who can’t be older than he ever remembers Becca growing to be spins in her chair she’s grinning ear to ear. He blinks at her, and she grins back, and he has a question on his lips but she’s raising her hands and clasping them together in excitement. 

She calls herself Shuri. She calls him the white boy, and colonizer, and Sergeant Barnes. And that’s fine, it’s fine. He’s not sure who he is, still working his way through his mind and his memory and his terrible, long life. He’s the winter soldier in his head. His mother’s voice is calling him James and his father’s calling him Jim-boy. Steve is calling him Bucky and Becca is calling him a jerk and his commanding officer calls him Barnes and his boys call him Sarge. Then Zola, sneering Sergeant Barnes like an insult, then it’s the Red Room, where he’s Soldat. Then it’s Hydra, where he’s Soldat or Winter Soldier or, or, or. 

There are so many names he’s not sure who he is, so he settles on calling himself nothing, and lets Shuri do the talking. 

“We’re going to take you to a nice, quiet place,” Shuri says after a while, gesturing to her lab with an apologetic smile. “This is no place for the healing you need. I got the trigger words out, I healed over a lot of the scarring in your brain from what those barbarians,” she spits the word with a violent expression, “did to you.” 

She stabs at the screen showing holographs of what he can only guess is his brain. All he can think of as he looks at the screen is what they look like splattered after a gunfight, after he crushes a head with his metal fingers, of how he thinks maybe, just maybe, his brain won’t look like fried food when someone finally does the same to him. 

He’s not sure quiet is what he deserves. He’s not sure but he thinks of Steve watching him go under from the other side of a glass panel. Of the heartbreak in those big blue eyes of his. He digs his nails into his palm and shifts in the soft tunic, and he nods. 

\--

Shuri takes him out of the city and leaves him beside a lake in a small little hut. There’s a few there, a small settlement. Nobody who lives here speaks English but Shuri. There’s an older lady who teaches him how to weave a basket with one hand and his feet. She calls herself Nana with a smile that creates a map of smile-lines beside her eyes and her mouth and he thinks perhaps she’s the happiest person on earth. Nana teaches him how to take care of the cows and the goats and how to bathe with one hand, how to dress. How to forage for good food and how to fry food and add spices. She shows him with gestures how to rebuild himself into something that can act human. 

He’s not sure if he’s watching the three little children that follow him, or if they’re watching him instead. They mock him sometimes, treat him like a curiosity. They braid his hair and bring him sweets. In return, he gives them little baskets and woven creations. They watch him when he clutches his basket between his thighs or his feet and carefully pulls reeds from one to the other. They copy him sometimes, but it doesn’t make him feel foolish like he thought it might, to watch them contort themselves into ridiculous positions to try and loop reeds under and over each other. 

Time is an odd concept to him still. Shuri comes every day until she doesn’t. “My brother is being crowned,” she says on the last day she sees him for a week. She’s buzzing with excitement and he’s holding a small calf under his one arm, in the middle of bringing him to his mother. 

He can’t help but be happy for her excitement though, this savior of his that brought him life and helps him heal. “Congratulations,” he says, and his voice is rough and gravelly and soft. He thinks of ‘43 when he could talk his way out of a mugging or into a date. When he was eloquent before he wasn’t. Before he had the weight of half a century of death on his shoulders. If the most he can do is one word at a time, he thinks he’ll start there. 

From the way it makes Shuri beam, he’ll take it. 

\--

Everything changes after that. Although Bucky still wakes up every day and helps Nana with meals, with feeding the boys and the cows and the goats. Although he fills his days with simple tasks that he can do with his hands, with his half-dead brain, with his body half-broken. He fills his days with simplicity and it helps, to have things to do. 

Shuri returns with a new set to her shoulders. She’s grown in the time between spaces and he thought it was only a week, but perhaps time passes differently for other people who aren’t here on this little plot of land next to this little lake and taking care of this herd of cows. But regardless, the routine comes back, but this time she teaches him things. They meditate, or spar or she teaches him new technology. She teaches him how to let his mind breathe, how to remember. How to be a human being again. Its little things and little moments. It's harnessing his mind again and making him the master of his own free will. Of those little choices that are so difficult, being made again. 

She’s cleared his head of all she could. All he can do is work with the pieces. 

“You’re not a machine,” she says softly when he’s frustrated. Her normally so exuberant nature is subdued. Her eyes are bright. She never looks at him like he’s broken. She tips her head and looks at him like he’s a human. Like he’s an enigma, but never like he’s a thing. She takes him as a challenge but she doesn’t back down. She doesn’t turn the key or reset the switch. She doesn’t give up like he has. She looks at him like he’s a puzzle to solve, like he’s a treasure slowly unfurling.

It makes him want to throw things, sometimes. It makes him want to shut down. It makes him want to try, on the good days. 

“I can give you a new arm if you like,” she says softly, like an offering. Like she wants to make him whole. He doesn’t know how to tell her he’ll never be whole, that she’s done the best she can with a thing like him.

“No,” he says, rough. “Not now.” 

\--

There’s a warrior that stands at the top of the hill from time to time. Bucky notices him the first time when he’s herding the cows back in for the night. He holds the line of the lead and feels their gaze burning on the back of his neck. He freezes in place, sliding his feet into a line of action and looking over his shoulder at the figure on the hill.

He stares down at him, dressed in furs and black leathers. He’s got wide, broad shoulders and he holds his weight in them. He’s towering and massive, and Bucky’s looking for holes in his stance before he catches himself. He’s not here to kill. For all the glare burning into him calls for it, for all that gaze meets his in a challenge, he doesn’t return it. He doesn’t go up there, he leads the cows inside and watches the sunset with Nana over a nice, quiet dinner. 

\--

The warrior is at the door of his hut in the morning. “White Wolf,” he says, towering over him with a grin that bares his teeth. “I am M’Baku.” He says it like he’s supposed to know him, like he’s a leader or a commanding officer or a king. He says it like a command. 

Bucky lifts himself off his pallet and sits cross-legged on the floor. He squints up at him through the glare of the morning light beyond him, haloing his silhouette. His heart pounds from the proximity, from the lack of exists, from the lack of a contingency plan in his mind. He takes a deep, slow breath, just like Shuri taught him when she taught him meditation. 

“I’m Bucky,” he says, and he does it with a soft, half quirk of his lips. 

M’Baku steps inside the hut and kneels down so he can look him in the eye. This close Bucky can see that yes, he has furs, and leathers, and studded armor. He looks like a warrior of old for all he knows this is the 21st century. He looks timeless. 

“I hear you’re the greatest warrior of the colonizers.” 

Bucky thinks of Steve and almost laughs. A warrior? Him? “I’m just a weapon,” he says with a scoff. 

His hair falls into his eyes as he tips his head, studying the tall man who might be a king. Studying ways to win a fight if he struck out at him now. Studying the pressure points that are open, how he’d compensate for his adjusted body mass to pull him off his feet and on the ground with his head between his thighs. 

“Fight me then, weapon,” M’Baku grins, holding out his hand. “I need a good challenge today.” 

And Bucky looks at his outstretched arm, at the callouses in the open palm. It’s the palm of one who lived a hard-working life. A palm much like his looked once before it got ripped from him. He takes the hand and is whisked off his feet out of his hut.

\--

M’Baku brings him to an open plain where the sun beats down on them both but the grass is soft and the dirt is warm and solid under his bare feet. M’Baku strips down to his trousers, and Bucky hesitates before he unties the shawl around his empty shoulder, before he pulls the shirt over his head and lets his scars speak of his life for themselves. He can feel the heavy gaze on his skin that does not shy away. 

Under the sun M’Baku’s skin glistens with sweat. There’s a spark of life in his eyes and he’s grinning like a fool who just got Christmas early. Bucky drops into a defensive stance, mirroring his opponent, and they circle one another in the dirt. 

He lets M’Baku strike first, all bared teeth and thick coiled muscle and a strike fast as lightning towards his face. He jerks out of the way but even with superhuman strength and chemically addled reflexes, it’s a near thing. He has time to reach for the arm that struck for him, to slap it back away from him with a quick strike. But what he thought was a feint or would be a dodge turns into a full-on tackle and he’s on his back in the dirt before he knows what hit him like a train. 

M’Baku grins into his hair and laughs. “Ha! How’s that, colonizer?”

And Bucky feels.

It’s electric, running up from deep inside under his pelvis. It’s rage, it’s fury, it’s embarrassment or pride or the need to prove himself to this warrior, this man who carries himself like a king. Its self-worth and contest wrapped up in one and Bucky can’t remember the last time he felt a competitive swell rush up in him. It was before Italy, he knows that. There was a shadow of it when Steve saved him. He felt it faint as a ghost against the back of his neck when he was a howling commando, but that was nothing compared to this. 

This was living. This was the blood pounding in his veins and the drum of his heartbeat in his ears. This was easy as breathing. Bucky takes a deep breath and laughs. It sounds so odd, so sharp and husky and nothing like what it once was, but that’s okay. He headbutts M’Baku in the face. He knees him in the side. When he staggers to his feet and back away from him Bucky leaps onto him, climbs him like a tree and envelopes his head with his thighs. He flips, pulling him with his weight and throwing him to the ground. He lands on his feet and digs his fingers into the earth and feels the pulse of life beneath his hands and laughs. 

M’Baku groans when he drags himself to his feet. He shakes his shoulders and tosses his head and grins so brightly at Bucky it makes his heart twist in his chest. And there’s something there, snaking itself between his ribs and down into his gut. It’s hot and cold, fire and ice. Two polar opposite sensations, mingling together and burning and sparking their way through his gut. 

“Who are you?” Bucky asks. He means: are you like me? Are you a soldier? Are you a weapon to be pointed? Or are you the one who points the weapon, the king, the conqueror. He means: Why are you here, why do you watch me, what is this really? He wants: to be human, to be real. 

And M’Baku grins, and there’s blood in his mouth between his teeth. “I am M’baku, king of the Jabari.” He says it with his arms outstretched. They glitter in the sun from sweat, covered in dirt and grass, same as Bucky. There’s dirt along the side of his face, there’s some in his hair, even. 

“Who are you?” M’Baku asks. He means: What, like an accusation. He means: Why here, now, in this place, in this country. He means: What do you bring us but pain? “Weapon? Soldier?” 

Bucky breathes sharply through his nose. He’s all of those things. He’s none of those things. “Bucky,” he says quietly like Steve said it when he was on his knees in front of him with bullet holes bleeding out, with those blue blue eyes pleading with him to please come back, please don’t do this, please remember. “I just want to be Bucky.” 

And M’Baku laughs as he tackles him again, as he slams him down into the ground so hard his teeth rattle in his skull. The empty socket of his shoulder burns from the sweat and the dirt and the movement and his skin is so hot it could be on fire and his fingers grip M’Baku by the neck and pulls his head down and kisses him so desperately it feels like he just fell a mile to the frozen wasteland again. He bites his bottom lip and arches up against him. Before he realizes what he’s done he’s being kissed back, all bites and tongue and challenge accepted, don’t back down now. 

Dirt sticks to his sweat-slicked skin as M’Baku presses him to the ground. There’s a thigh between his legs, heavy and pressing down against his groin. His dick jolts and he gasps. A rush of blood through his veins, all flurry and heat and his body reacting to the coiled muscles of M’Baku’s body, of his hand on the back of his neck, of the other, slipping down from shoulder to chest to down, down, down until his trousers are pulled down and those calloused fingers grasp his dick in his hand. 

Emotion hits Bucky like a backhand and he stares up with his jaw muscles jumping as he clenches until it aches. Until he remembers he’s looking up into M’Baku’s eyes, not his handlers. He’s looking up and reaching up and he’s got a grip on the back of his neck too, he’s got a grip and he could clench the nape until the thick muscles there give, but he doesn’t. He presses their foreheads together and he gasps when M’Baku strokes him and he rides a high he didn’t think he’d ever feel again when he comes, when he collapses back shuddering, when he bites his lip and blinks back tears and looks up at the blue blue sky over M’Baku’s shoulder and can’t quite get enough breath, doesn’t think he’ll ever get enough oxygen for how quick it all goes. 

“White Wolf,” M’Baku says. 

He says it like it’s sacred, like a confession. Bucky stares at him with wary eyes and pushes him back, back, _back_ , until he’s lying prone against the sand. The hand he’s spread against his chest stays as he levers himself down and swallows M’Baku’s dick with his mouth, tongue pushing against the tip. He hasn’t done this in half a century and he closes his eyes and lets the sensation of the roiling body underneath carry him forward into the memory of it. The memory of a time before when he was still young and Steve was still small and they were in their shoebox apartment and he got him off on the couch with his knees digging into the hardwood floor and his hands (both of them) gripping Steve’s waist.

Now he’s got his one hand splayed still against M’Baku’s abdomen and he tastes precum, he feels the hand in his hair of warning, of the tug and the pull and the jerk of pain. Bucky rides the wave of his body as his hips jerk forward when he comes with the profound yell of a warrior who just claimed victory over the battlefield. Bucky takes him in his mouth and swallows him down and when he comes he takes it all. When he pulls back he’s still bracketed by M’Baku’s knees, gasping in the sunlight. 

There are streaks of dirt across M’Baku’s grinning, delighted face. Bucky leans forward and brushes it off his nose, off his cheeks, off his forehead. When he leans forward he kisses him softly. 

“You’re not such a warrior,” M’Baku says when he pulls away. It should be an accusation, but it tastes more like freedom. Like a little bit of hope, spinning its way like sunlight across his chest. 

Bucky wipes dirt from his own face and feels himself smiling. It feels so strange he has to look at the ground, at their bodies, at himself, still drawn between M’Baku’s legs. He looks up and quirks an eyebrow and feels so, so light. “I could do with a swim, how about you?” 

And M’Baku grips him by the elbow and kisses his brow. There’s a rush of heat at the contact, where his skin is warm and there’s a solid weight that grounds him to the earth and keeps him from wavering and losing it all. “Only if I can throw you in,” M’Baku says and he’s still grinning when Bucky leans forward to kiss it away. 

“You can try,” he mutters against his lips, and peels back and up and away, towards the hut and the lake, shining brightly in the sunlight as he falls into a full, loping sprint, chased by a man, a warrior, a king.   



End file.
